The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My old roommate Chicago Larry and I lived in a HUD house down in the ghetto in Seattle, two white boys gentrifying a mixed neighborhood not very much interested in being gentrified. Larry was a city boy and I was his chucklehead country sidekick. Our neighbors were pimps and gunrunners, white slavers and drug salesmen. Larry said, “They don’t know what to make of me, but I know exactly what to make of them.” Me, I didn’t have a clue what to make of either.

The lot next to our house was vacant, one of two or three on the block, overgrown with blackberries and bushes, weeds and garbage. A house had once stood there, but all that was left to indicate a prior civilization was the foundation and a couple of old fruit trees. In spring the cherries would blossom in a showy junkyard display and brighten our days. We didn’t get many cherries, not once the birds noticed them ripening up.

The day the guys came with a chainsaw to cut the cherry, Larry was home since he drove cab at night. The whine of the saw next to his bedroom window woke him up in a bad mood. He pulled on his pants and walked out the door to speak with these urban Paul Bunyans. “Whatcha doin’?” he asked. They said they were cutting the tree down. “What for?” Larry asked. “Sell for firewood,” they said. Their saw was dull and hadn’t made much headway into the trunk of the cherry. “This your tree?” Larry asked. “This yours?” they answered.

Larry said no, it wasn’t, but he didn’t want to see it cut down either. He said he’d pay them what they’d get for the firewood. The loggers said, in their best getto-lingo, to go away. They called him a Honky, started their reluctant saw and went back to work killing that tree. I won’t say Larry’s an unreasonable fellow. He prefers negotiation to violence. Up to a point. Past that point, Mr. Hyde steps into view.

He went back in our house, got his .38, the one he carried for protection in his taxi and went back outside. He tried to make himself heard over the shrieking chainsaw, but the two loggers refused to look his way. Larry pulled the trigger and everything stopped immediately.

Larry suggested they put their saw in the truck and leave now. It seemed like a good idea to them as well. Five minutes after their departure, the police arrived. Reports of gunfire, they said. Did Larry know anything about this? “Indeed I do, Officer,” he said, more than happy to tell them his side of the story.

“Do you own the tree, sir?” the younger one asked. “Do you still have the weapon?” Larry retrieved the .38, stood at the bottom of the stairs, answered a couple more questions, all the time gesturing with the gun in his hand, explaining his position with the tree muggers.

Finally the older officer stepped forward and asked, “Would you mind giving us the weapon?” There was a long moment when all three pondered the reality of him holding a loaded pistol, no doubt still a bit adrenalined up, obviously a person of some volatility, waving a pistol for story-telling effect. Larry smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.” The old cop took the gun. Everyone relaxed.

They cited him for discharging a firearm in city limits, confiscated his gun and warned him about further violations. Larry bought a new gun next day and hid it in the ceiling where he forgot it when he moved. No doubt it’s still there. The cherry lived. It oozed sap for a year, but it lived. Last time I drove by our old house a three story town house filled the vacant lot. They’d cut the cherry down to make maximum use of the space. Gentrification, I guess, has its price….

I was over at a friend’s house up on the North End, looking at his newly crafted cigar box banjos. I know what you’re thinking … and yes, I do have friends on the North End. And no, these cigar box banjos weren’t some thrown together in a drunken afternoon cheeseballs masquerading as musical instruments. They were objets d’art first of all — and first of all they were musical instruments, from the tuning pegs to the piezo pickups that allowed them to be played through an amp, which gave my buddy’s slide blues a nasty growl. You’d think you’d landed in a late night bar on the Lousville waterfront next to the Ohio River in 1920.

I’m forever amazed at how many folks are out there, just out of sight, doing their own thing, not for remuneration or accolades, just for the sheer joy of it. Folks who never joined the Arts Associations, folks who work with woods and metals and found objects and cigar boxes and whatever else comes to hand. My pal told me the story of a local artist at a la-de-da soiree asking what he did after crowing about her own artistic achievements so he mentioned a few projects he’d completed recently. “Oh,” she said dismissively, “you’re a crafts person.”

We so-called artists like to draw a distinction between art and craft. As if they’re inescapably discrete and inviolably separate. It’s a boring argument, trust me, like arguing religion, fit only for adolescents and morons with an ideological bent. But I do know this: there are people like my cigarbox buddy who apply a spark of creativity to everything they touch. They probably can’t help it, it’s as natural as laughing. The old adage that something worth doing is worth doing well rolls off their imagination slightly differently. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with p-zazz.

My own definition of an artist — and it’s the same for a craftsman — is a person who creates their life. In their own image. Meaning, with their own imagination. They make the world around them. They create. They don’t do it so they can say at some party they’re an artiste. They do it because there’s no other way to do it. And when I’m fortunate enough to be around them, they’re an inspiration. Those cigarbox banjos — they belong in a museum. But meantime, they got some blues waiting to come out, stuff that will make a toe tap, stuff that will make you smile, stuff that will make a guy like me want to try to make one myself. It’s about all I can ask from art.

Almost all us old farts that use a computer these digital days are basically self taught. The student becomes the teacher. The blind, of course, are leading the blind. Most of us think a computer is a mail shortcut — we open it up, check our e-mail (mostly jokes and political rants), maybe forward a few, then go back to CNN or Fox News on the TV. Some of the more adventurous of us learn to download photos or music, maybe catch some internet news or use Google, but really we barely dip a toe in the oceanic vastness of what is someone’s Brave New World but certainly not ours.

We’re just tourists skimming the surface of a planet we don’t know how to land on, whose language we’ll never learn, whose inhabitants won’t notice us beyond the mosquito buzz we generate as we hover over a Mac or a PC or a smartphone. Meanwhile the world below is morphing before our eyes, but we have no clue and Wikipedia and Google aren’t much help.

Even the kids don’t really scratch deep. Oh, they learn a smidgeon of a complicated program for a job, Photoshop say, or Publisher, but beyond their current needs, the complexity is too overwhelming to retain if it’s not repeated day after day. The world is moving too fast now to keep up.

Maybe it always was. Gramp had to learn to drive the new fangled tractor, then he had to learn how to fix the danged thing. Most folks couldn’t change a tire much less tear down an engine. The computer goes blue or malware invades its brain, we’re adrift without compass or GPS in a forest at night, hopeless and helpless.

And totally dependent. We’ve become the children of the machine. It’s a loveless bargain, but … they’ve closed the orphanage and there’s no going home now.

The South End Grange has been shrinking faster than our old growth nettle forests, which may be a meaningful correlation … unless you’re of the mindset that thinks science is a hoax foisted on you by us radical liberals hiding here on the hedonistic head of the island. Membership keeps declining and it’s harder and harder to recruit the agrarian-minded now that the family farm has gone the way of Eisenhower Republicans and McGovern Democrats. Desperate times, of course, call for desperate measures. Who you gonna call??

The South End String Band, of course. Which is who the Grange called for its loco-ly known high powered PR Machine. When old time fiddle music seemed poised for extinction, they brought it back from the precipice, dressed it up as South End Roots Music and made fortunes on CD’s, T-shirts and memorabilia before offering shares on the Chinese stockmarket. Obviously they had the savvy to save the Grange from the dustbin of history.

Following a four hour brainstorming session at the Mabana Yacht Club’s exclusive Pilot House Lounge, the Band emerged into the early afternoon sunlight with a Plan, one deceptively simple, almost painfully obvious and no doubt destined to serve as prototype for marketing strategies at the Harvard School of Bizness and the Phoenix School of mail order agricultural degrees.

Cannabis. The New Pharming. The most lucrative crop in America, bigger than corn, bigger than soybeans, bigger even than medical nettle. And for the past half century, the only crop on the South End. And now … LEGAL. Welcome to the 60’s, y’all! Agriculture is King once again and the Grange and the lava lamp are both coming BACK!!

So dust off those bellbottoms, bro, unpack those tie-dyes, sister, turn on the blacklights, dude, clean up the hookahs, Alice, cause the South End String Band is playing a Strange Grange Ganja Gig Saturday, Nov. 1. Come on down and join them in a return to the Age of Aquarius. The Past was nothing but Prologue and the Present is nothing if not Psychedelic. The South End: where the 60’s met the Sound. And the Sound is the South End String Band!!